Audacia Ray is a media maker and activist who is passionate about sexual rights. Presently, Audacia is the Program Officer for Online Communications and Campaigns at the International Women’s Health Coalition, an adjunct professor of Human Sexuality at Rutgers University, and the co-host of the monthly reading series Sex Worker Literati in New York. Dacia is the author of Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration. Audacia is a former sex worker who was an executive editor at $pread magazine for three years and is a co-founder of advocacy organization Sex Work Awareness, for which she edits the public education blog Sex Work 101 and provides media training workshops for sex workers. Dacia is also the award-winning director and producer of the porn feature The Bi Apple as well as the producer and star of the comedic film short Dacia’s Love Machine.She has blogged at WakingVixen.com since 2004 and has also edited a blog for the Village Voice and written for Fleshbot. She has a BA from Eugene Lang College at the New School and a MA from Columbia University. She is based in New York.
Last year the African Union declared this decade, 2010-2020 as the African Women’s Decade. Between July 30th and August 4th nearly 500 women were raped in and around the village of Luvungi in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in a campaign of ongoing terror waged by armed groups who use rape as a weapon of war.
Craigslist’s self-censorship of adult services ads will not end sex trafficking. As a former advertiser, I know not all commercial sex is sex slavery.
Watch Meena Seshu, co-founder of SANGRAM, a sex-worker’s rights organization, deliver the Jonathan Mann Memorial Lecture at the International AIDS Conference (IAC) Thursday in Vienna.
The mainstream media is notorious for misgendering trans people; when trans women are written about, they are described as being “men dressed as women” and referred to persistently as “he.” And although many gay rights groups include the letter “T” in their acronyms and claim to be inclusive of diversity in gender identity, they don’t hesitate to blatantly disregard gender identity when it serves their purpose of arguing for “equality” in the treatment of gays.
The exercise of human rights should not be contingent on whether or not you think a person’s choices or circumstances are a good way to live or be. Entangling morality with a conversation about rights and painting a portrait of people in the sex industry as victims without voices only perpetuates their disempowerment.
The American sex worker rights movement has a long way to go, and we can learn a lot from activists in other parts of the world. For example, there are eight countries in Europe that accept sex workers trade unions branches in pre-existing unions. In India, I met sex workers who are illiterate and live in one room buildings without electricity – but they can talk fiercely about human rights, language which is all but absent from our movement.
This morning President Obama announced the end of travel restrictions that have long prevented HIV positive foreign nationals from entering the United States.
To succeed in strengthening U.S. foreign policy, including reducing poverty and maximizing our development assistance, and upholding the human rights of girls and women around the world, ending child marriage must continue to be a policy priority for Congress and the Obama Administration.
Part of equal sharing of responsibilities means establishing standards for compensation and other forms of support and recognition for women’s work, especially in the caretaking context.
